TV Dashboards with Chromecast Lessons Learned
We've been displaying SiSense dashboards on TV monitors in our offices for over 6 months and wanted to share the lessons we've learned through this experience.
Most importantly do not use a browser add-on to refresh the pages with the dashboards. We found that we kept getting logged out of the dashboards, plus if there was an error it would keep refreshing the error screen even once fixed. Instead use the javascript below in your dashboard:
dashboard.on('initialized', function(se, ev){
var refreshIntervalMiliSec = 100000;
var refreshDashboard = function(){
se.refresh();
}
setInterval(refreshDashboard, refreshIntervalMiliSec);
})
This is currently set to refresh the data every 100 seconds but this value can be modified in the code.
Secondly I would recommend not using traditional computers for displaying to the TVs. We tried this at first with computers set up by our IT department and accessed them using Dameware but there always seemed to be issues which required daily attention. There may be set ups using traditional computers which would work but with so many cheaper and easier options available it isn't worth it.
Our most recent system uses Chromecasts at the monitors and a single Windows machine casting the dashboards. This has been working great so far and not including the TVs cost under $500 to implement for five screens.
For security purposes you will need to have your IT department create a separate SSID for the Chromecasts and the central computer you will cast from. This is due to the fact that anyone on the same network as the Chromecast can cast to it. We hid the SSID and only shared the password with users who work with the monitors. You will also want to disable guest mode on the Chromecasts as an extra precaution. With this set up someone would have to physically reset the Chromecast in order to hijack the monitor.
In order to cast to multiple screens using a single computer you need to create multiple chrome users on that machine. This is limited in a Chromebook since you can only have two browser users logged in at a time. On our windows laptop we were able to create and run five separate users at a time which allowed us to cast to all five screens.
In order to create the users in Chrome simply go to your Chrome settings page and under People select 'Add Person'. You'll have to create a Google account for each user but this only takes a minute to do. We named the users after the monitors they would display and selected the option to create a shortcut for that user.
There are plenty of resources online about how to set up a Chromecast so I won't go into detail here.
I hope this article will help some users avoid the headaches we dealt with trying to figure some of this out.
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Thanks for this post Joseph. It is very helpful. I came across dashboardrotator's desktop app which lets you specify a list of URL and display time etc. Could you use this in combination with the script in your article to have a screen that rotates through a list of your dashboards and other site and news feeds? Cheers - John
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